no race barriers. A song that lifts the spirit with its lilt wings
free in the democracy of art.
It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of the Negro's employment of these cultural gifts. A new generation of both races respond to them. They afford white America a new approach to what we have overlong dourly called the Race Problem. They make for swifter understanding than a multitude of heavy treatises. I speak from experience with our special number of the Survey Graphic [Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro: March, 1925] which Dr. Locke edited and which was the forerunner of this book. Harlem presents to the eye the look of any tenement and apartment district of New York so far as its physical make-up is concerned. Occasionally some writer dipped beneath the surface: Negro authors and periodicals had borne witness to it; yet so far as the newspapers were concerned, it had not registered, except as an area of real estate speculation and clashes, and the police news and racial friction of a city quarter. Kipling gave us the High Road to India in Kim. Sinclair Lewis set down America in Main Street. But that contrast is not the whole story of East and West; here was something as alluring as it was portentous happening in our midst; but unobserved and swathed in the commonplace. How to unfold it? Our number was cut from city cloth, it brought out the seams of social problems which underlie it, but also, and in all its sheen, the cultural pattern that gave it texture. It proved a magic carpet which swung the reader not across the minarets and bazaars of some ancient Arabia, but the wells and shrines of a people's renaissance. The pageant of it swept past in pastel and story, poem and epic prose, and the response was instant. In this volume, what was then done fragmentarily is now done in a way which will endure.
For the Negro to thus make himself, and his, articulate to those about him will count for much; but it is the lesser good of two. He is finding himself anew in his own eyes. His self-expression is giving body to his special racial genius; he gains a new sense of its integrity and distinction. I recall a discussion at the Harlem Forum of the work of Winold Reiss
